Katerina Diamond - The Angel

‘Are you going to be a problem?’ the other man said. Gabriel looked at him more closely; the name Trey was tattooed on his neck. Gabriel shook his head slightly and watched as Trey twirled the glass pipe in between his fingers, a smile on his face.

‘It’s fucking Baltic in here,’ the one who Gabriel now supposed must be Chris said, rubbing his hands together.

Trey dropped a few rocks of crack into the pipe and sucked in a couple of deep breaths as though he were about to dive into the sea before putting his lips to the edge of the pipe. He held the lighter under the glass bowl and gently rolled the glass stem in his fingers as he slowly drew the milky smoke into his lungs. His expression changed and he sat back in his chair. Chris took the pipe from him. Gabriel noticed that Leanne was watching Emma the whole time, obviously trying to gauge her reaction to this, to see if she was open to it. He saw her shiver again.

‘We should go. It’s freezing in here,’ Gabriel said, stepping closer to his girlfriend. The sun was going down and he didn’t fancy crossing the tracks in the dark, plus he really didn’t want to be here with these people any longer.

‘Killjoy.’ Leanne grinned, her face like a viper.

‘It’s OK. We’ll go in a bit.’ Emma smiled at Gabriel. He noticed how people were different with each other; Emma behaved differently when they were alone, she behaved differently with her family too and she was definitely behaving differently here with Leanne. This behaviour didn’t feel like her, it was a side he hadn’t seen before. A tapping sound echoed against the window as the rain began.

‘It’s starting to chuck it down,’ Gabriel said, looking at Emma hopefully, trying to impart to her his strong desire to leave. She just shifted her gaze away.

‘Why don’t you see if you can warm it up in here?’ Leanne asked him, it was a challenge, a threat maybe; there was something about her that made Gabriel really uneasy and it seemed amplified in here.

Gabriel went to the corner and grabbed the metal waste paper bin that had been left in the signal box. He didn’t want to cause a fuss; maybe his argument with his father earlier had made him extra defensive, maybe he wasn’t thinking straight. He collected some of the rubbish from the floor and piled it in before picking up one of Trey’s lighters from the table and snapping the head off.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Trey said.

Gabriel tipped the fluid from the lighter into the bin and then picked another lighter from the table. He found himself trying to prove something to Leanne; she had a way about her that made him feel impotent, it explained why Emma was the way she was around her.

‘Don’t break them all!’ Chris said, holding the crack pipe in his hands, menace in his voice.

Gabriel lit the edge of a piece of card and threw it into the bin. It ignited immediately. He concentrated on the flames, hoping this part of the evening would be over soon enough. He felt strangely vulnerable. Something terrible was going to happen.

DS Adrian Miles held his hand out to his partner DS Imogen Grey to help her over the railway sleeper, his other hand lighting up the wet ground with the torch app on his mobile phone. Imogen tutted and stepped over the sleeper without assistance, trudging off ahead. They walked along the side of the tracks until they got to the burnt-out signal box which was illuminated by the lights on the fire truck. There was no more smoke now; it was a dripping carcass of a building.

‘You look nice, Grey,’ Adrian said as his torch beam hit Imogen’s face. He instinctively stepped out of her reach as he complimented her. She had her hair up and lipstick on; tonight must have been a special occasion. He by contrast had been lying on his sofa watching old episodes of Star Trek when they got the call.

‘I was out to dinner.’

‘Wow, that sounds so grown-up.’

‘Shut up, Miley.’

The fact was, it was good to see Imogen like this. Her mother had not long woken from a coma and, within a few weeks, had left to go on a ‘restful’ holiday, leaving Imogen with only guilt that she hadn’t protected her, that the attack on her towards the end of their last police case was somehow Imogen’s fault. She was often distracted by it at work, but Adrian knew better than to mention it, he had to trust that she would know she could confide in him if she needed to.

‘Is Dean all right? Behaving himself?’ Adrian asked, checking there were no uniformed officers listening in. Despite all of Adrian’s predictions to the contrary, Imogen and Dean were still together. Even with Dean’s sketchy history, something he’d apparently assured Imogen was in the past, they had managed to make it work. It wasn’t illegal to date an ex-con but it certainly wasn’t looked on favourably. At some point, they would have to declare it, which would mean even more scrutiny from the higher-ups, something Adrian could do without.

‘He’s good.’ She looked down and smiled. ‘It’s his birthday, so we went out for a curry.’

‘Wise not to subject him to too much of your cooking if you want to keep him around.’

‘It’s not my fault that mushroom risotto got burned,’ she protested.

‘I was impressed, I didn’t know you could burn anything in a microwave, let alone soggy rice.’

A firefighter walked over to them, cutting through the darkness of the night.

‘Looks pretty serious,’ Adrian said. The firefighter nodded.

The train station manager was approaching down from the platform with a quickened pace; he had probably been dragged in from home as well.

‘Officers,’ he said, nodding at them both.

‘Follow me,’ the firefighter said, beckoning them towards the ruined signal box. They got to the foot of the building; the wooden staircase was completely gone, as was the entire top floor.

‘Deliberate?’ Adrian asked, pulling out his notebook.

‘We’ve had a lot of trouble with kids and homeless people breaking into this one in the past,’ the station manager offered. ‘Until the investigation is complete we can’t say for sure, but it definitely looks that way. Even though this is old wood it’s a rainy night, and from the calls we got, it escalated to disproportionate levels for what we would expect from a building like this. There does seem to be some evidence of accelerant.’

‘Do you think it’s arson then?’ Adrian asked him.

‘I’m leaning that way. The point of origin seems to be a waste paper bin, but we’ll need to check that out further.’

‘Do you have any CCTV footage?’ Imogen turned to the station manager.

‘We do. My colleague is just retrieving it for you now. It’s a poorly lit area and with the terrible weather the visibility will be even crappier, not to mention the fact that it was actually night when whoever it was came out. It’s possible that when the arsonist was leaving some of the station lights or the lights on the bridge illuminated the area a little better though.’

‘Did they not tell you the main reason you’re here?’ the firefighter asked, looking between them curiously.

‘What do you mean?’ Adrian asked.

‘We found a body.’

Imogen and Adrian looked at each other.

‘You probably should have led with that,’ Imogen said crossly.

‘The fire started in the upstairs part of the building but the body was in the room with the mechanics on the ground floor. Probably male, possibly homeless, but that’s really a wild guess as the body is so badly damaged. It’s most likely he snuck in here for a kip or something. They come into the bottom of the building because there are no windows. It happens all the time. We’ll know more when the investigators have done a proper search and you get your pathologist down to the site to have a look before the body is moved.’